Pain & SufferingSample

Shared pain

It’s one thing to suffer pain; it’s another thing to suffer it alone. So often we find ourselves in dark places and conclude we must be the only ones struggling in such an uncomfortable landscape. This sense of aloneness can heighten the pain. Everyone else is sailing along merrily while you, and only you, are sinking in stormy waters. The reality is that no one else is experiencing pure bliss and problem-free merriment.

Paul the apostle did not hesitate to share his own struggles with his readers. He wasn’t one who put himself on a triumphal pedestal and thus suggested others should share in his victory over the stress and strains of everyday life. His honesty meant others could also be honest. If the great apostle found things hard at times, then others could also admit to struggling without feeling miserably unspiritual.

The church has been called a community of the broken-hearted, which it is. Sadly, some individuals and some churches choose to dismiss this as defeatist. Which means those in such churches have no permission to share their own brokenness. They fall short of the ideal being modelled and taught, and so shrink into their secret world of suffering.

Far better to be wisely open about our pain, and so allow others to be similarly open, enabling them to minister helpfully to us. We are not, after all, to be models of success or perfection, but models of faithful perseverance and compassion born out of our own journeys into unwelcome darkness. Shared pain may not remove the pain, but it can help us and others hang on to faith in the midst of it.

Written by DAVID REAY